I shuffled to her side and nuzzled her hair and neck. “See, the thing is,” I said indistinctly, “if I don’t see that Japanese captain again, I’m going to be afraid of him for the rest of my life. He’s giving me nightmares and all. And I know Add could help me to find one of those landings.”
“He could not,” she said, irritated. I tried to put my hand back down her pants to distract her, but she seized it and pushed it away. “Don’t,” she said coldly. “See? You did get me up here to ask me to pester my dad. Listen—I don’t want you bothering him about Orange County or the Japanese or any of that, you hear? Don’t ask him nothing and don’t get him mixed up in anything you do.” She brushed leaves out of her hair, crawled away from me to the edge of the pool. “He’s got enough trouble in your damn valley without you trying to give him more.” She cupped some water and drank, brushed her hair back with angry slaps.
I stood up unsteadily, and walked over to the swing tree. She had made me feel awful guilty and calculating; and she looked beautiful, kneeling there by the dark pool; but still! All that holy innocent routine, after the way she had talked to the scavengers that night—after she and Add had welcomed them into their house, to tell them what they had learned by spying on our “damn valley” and its most foolish citizen Henry Aaron Fletcher … it made me grind my teeth.
The swing tree grows out of the rib that holds the pool in. Long ago someone had tied a thick piece of rope to one of the upper branches, and the rope was used to swing out over the steep canyon below. Angrily I grabbed the rope by the knots at its loose end, and walked back from the drop-off. Taking a good hold above the knot, I ran across the clearing at an angle away from the tree, and swung out into space. It had been a long time. Swinging around in the shadows felt good. I could see the canyon wall opposite, still catching some sun, and below me, treetops in shadow. I spun slowly, looking back to locate the tree’s thick trunk. I missed it by a good margin on landing. One time Gabby had taken a swing while drunk, and had come right into the tree, back first, hitting a little broken-off nub of a branch. That had taken the color out of him.
“Don’t you talk to us about that stuff anymore, are you listening to me, Henry?”
“I’m listening.”
“I like you fine, but I won’t abide any talk about Daddy dealing with those folks up there. We get enough grief about that as it is, and for no good reason at all. There’s no cause for it.” She sounded so sorrowful and put upon, I wanted to yell down at her, you get grief for it because you’re a pair of scavengers, you bitch! I’ve seen you spy for them! But I clamped my jaws together and said “Yeah,” and started another swing. “I hear you,” I said bitterly to the air. She didn’t reply. The rope creaked loudly. I tapped my feet together, spinning nice and slow. When I came in I went out again, and then again. For a moment I felt how wonderful it was to swing, and I wished I could swing out there forever, spinning slowly at the rope’s end, free of the earth and with no worries but clearing the tree, with nothing to think about but the air rushing by me, and the shadowed trees spinning around me, and the dark green pool below to one side. Surely the knot in my stomach would leave me then. When I landed I almost smashed face first into the treetrunk. That was just the way of it: spend your time in wishing and a tree smacks your face for you.
Melissa was crouched by the pool, holding her hair back with a hand, leaning over to drink directly from the spring. “I’m leaving,” I said harshly.
“I need help getting up the ridge.” She didn’t look at me.
I considered telling her she could go down the canyon and around the valley and not need any help, but I thought better of it.
We didn’t have much to say on the way back. It was hard work climbing up the final walls of the box canyon, and we both got dirty. Melissa refused to let me help her except when she couldn’t get up without it, perhaps remembering the handhold I had used on the way down. The more I thought about the way she had worked on me, the angrier I got. And to think I had still wanted her. Why, I was a fool—and the Shankses were no better than thieves. Scavengers. Spies. Zopilotes! Not only that, but there was no way I was going to be able to get the information I needed out of them.
We walked down the Basilone slope a few trees apart. “I don’t need your help anymore,” Melissa said coldly. “You can go back to your valley where you belong.”
Without a word I turned and cut across the slope down toward the valley, and heard her laugh. Seething, I stopped behind a tree and waited a while; then I continued on toward the Shankses’, and circled around so that I came on it from the north, moving from tree to tree with great caution. From the notch of a split pine I could see their weird house perfectly. Addison was by the door, in earnest conference with Melissa. She pointed south to the valley, laughing, and Add nodded. He had on his long, greasy brown coat (a good match for his hair), and when he was done questioning Melissa, he opened the door and sent her inside with a slap on the butt. Then he was off into the woods, passing just a few trees from me as he headed north. I waited, and then followed him. There was a bit of a trail through the trees—made by Add himself, no doubt, in his many trips north—and I hustled along it tippytoe, watching for twigs on the ground, and Addison ahead. When I saw him again I dodged out of the trail and hid behind a spruce, breathing hard. I stuck my head around the tree and saw that he was still walking away from me; hopping around the trunk I highstepped through the trees, landing on the balls of my feet, on dirt or pine needles, and twisting my legs like I was dancing to avoid twigs or leaves that might snap under me. At the end of each crazy run I fetched up against a tree, and glanced around it to relocate Add. So far, so good; he didn’t seem to have the slightest notion he was being followed. Time after time I checked to make sure his back was to me, and waited until he was obscured by the trees in between us, so I couldn’t be sure which direction he was going in; then I leaped from cover and darted in whatever zigzag through the woods I thought would be the quietest. After several more batlike runs, I began to enjoy it. It wasn’t that I was just losing my fear, either—I was positively enjoying it. After all the shit that Add and Melissa had pulled on me, it was a real pleasure to be tricking him—to be better at his business than he was.
There was pleasure in flitting through the woods like that, as well. It was like trailing an animal, only now it was possible in a way that chasing an animal wouldn’t have been. Any animal in its senses would have been aware of me in an instant, and I never would have seen it again, nor known where it had gone to. A human, however, was very trackable. I could even choose which side of him I planned to come up on, and then cross over and trail him from the other side. Like it was a kind of hide and seek. Only now it was a game with some real stakes.
About halfway across San Mateo Valley I realized I was going to have a problem following him across the San Mateo River. The freeway was the only bridge, and it was as exposed as any bridge could be. I reckoned I would have to wait a long time after Add crossed it, and then hurry over, get back in the trees, and hope I could hustle ahead and relocate him.
I was still figuring all of this out when Add reached the bank of the San Mateo, considerably downriver from the freeway. I ducked behind yet another tree, a eucalyptus that was a bit too narrow for my purposes, and wondered what he was up to. He started looking all around, including back in my direction, and I crouched down and kept my head behind the trunk, so that I couldn’t see him anymore. The scruffy bark of the eucalyptus oozed gum; breathing hard, I stared at it, afraid to poke my head out again. Had he heard me? At the thought my pulse went woodpecker, and suddenly trailing a man didn’t seem pure fun after all. I lay flat, careful not to make a sound in all the eucalyptus crap behind me, and, holding my breath, I slowly stuck one eye’s worth of face around the trunk.
No Add. I stuck both eyes around and still didn’t see him. I scrambled to my feet again, and then I heard the sound of a motor, out on the river. Add came into sight again, still on the bank, lo
oking seaward, waving a hand. I stayed put. Add never looked around again, and soon I caught sight, between the trees, of a little boat with three men in it. There weren’t any oars; there was a motor, mounted on the aft. The man in the middle was Japanese. The one in the bow stood as they approached the bank, and he leaped to shore and helped Add secure the boat with a line around a tree.
While the other men clambered out of the boat, I crawled catlike from tree to tree, and finally slithered over a thick mat of eucalyptus leaves and pine needles, to a thick torrey pine only three or four trees from them. Under its low branches, and behind its trunk, I was sure they’d never see me.
The Japanese man—who looked somewhat like my captain, but was shorter—reached back into the boat and pulled out a white cloth bag, tied at the top. He handed it to Add. They asked Add some questions, and Add answered them. I could hear their voices, especially the Japanese man’s; but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. I drew in breath between my teeth, and cursed horribly in my mind. I really was very close to them—I couldn’t risk going any closer, and that was that. But except for an occasional word they said, like “how” or “you,” I could only get the tone of their voices. I was as close to them as I had been to Steve and Kathryn, when I overheard that conversation—but here the speakers were on a riverbank, and though the river didn’t seem very noisy, it was just noisy enough. You can’t eavesdrop on a riverbank successfully, I was learning; and so all my chasing and stalking was going to go to waste. Here was Add talking with a Japanese, probably discussing exactly the stuff I wanted to know; and here was I, just where I wanted to be, no more than four boat lengths away. And it wasn’t going to do me a bit of good.
Occasionally one of the two scavengers (scavengers I assumed they were, though they dressed like country folk) would laugh and kid Addison in a louder voice, so that I heard whole sentences. “Easy to fool fools,” one of them said. Add laughed at that. “This’ll all come back to us in a month or two,” the other said, pointing at Add’s bag. “Back to our whores, anyway!” the first one crowed. The Japanese man watched each of them in turn as they spoke, and never smiled at their jests. He asked a few more questions of Add, and Add answered them or so I assumed; with his back to me I could hardly hear Add at all.
And then, right before my eyes, the three men got back in the boat. Add untied the line and threw it to them, pushed off, and watched as they drifted downstream. They were out of my sight immediately, but I heard the motor start again. And that was it. I hadn’t learned a thing I didn’t know before.
Add watched them for only a moment or two, and then hiked right past me. I lay without moving for a bit, got up and headed after him. I actually pounded some of the trees I passed with my clenched fist. And Add was nowhere to be seen. I slowed down, so angry and frustrated that I didn’t know if I wanted to hunt him down. What was the point? But the alternative—hiking back to Onofre alone—was somehow even worse. I started ranging forward in big diagonals, dancing between the trees again in my silent run.
I never even saw him until he had slammed into me with his shoulder and knocked me to the ground. He pulled a knife from his belt and came after me, nearly falling on me. I rolled and kicked the forearm above the knife, twisted and kicked his knee, scrambled to my feet, dodged and struck my clasped hands into his neck, as fast as I could move. He crashed into a tree, lay stunned against it; I quick snatched the bag from his left hand, leaping back to avoid a swing of the knife. I held the heavy little bag up like a club and retreated rapidly.
“Stay right there or I’ll run and you’ll never see this bag again,” I rattled off. Thinking just ahead of my words, I said “I’m faster than you, and you won’t catch me. Nobody catches me in the woods.” And I laughed triumphantly at the look on his face, because it was true and he knew it. Nobody’s quicker than I am, and beating Add and his knife around in the trees, faster than I could think, faster than I could plan my moves, made me feel it. Add knew it too. Finally, finally, I had Addison Shanks where I wanted him.
With his free hand he rubbed his neck, glaring at me with the same hateful expression I had seen in the eyes of that snared weasel. “What do you want?” he said.
“I don’t want much. I don’t want this here bag, though it feels like quite a bit of silver, and maybe stuff more important than that, eh?” I might not have guessed the contents right, but one thing was sure—he wanted the bag. He looked at it, shifted forward, and I took three steps back and to the right, along an opening in the trees. “I reckon Tom and John and Rafael and the others would be mighty interested to see this bag, and hear what I have to tell about it.”
“What do you want?” he grated.
I stared back into his hating gaze, unafraid of him. “I don’t like how you’ve been using me,” I said. The knife in his hand jerked, and I thought, don’t tell him how much you know. “I want to see one of those Japanese landings in Orange County. I know they’re doing it, and I know that you’re in on them. I want to know when and where the next one lands.”
He looked puzzled, and let the knife drop a hand’s breadth. Then he grinned, his eyes still hating me, and I flinched. “You’re with the other kids, aren’t you. Young Nicolin and Mendez and the rest.”
“Just me.”
“Been spying on me, have you? And John Nicolin doesn’t know about it, I bet. No.”
I raised the bag. “Tell me when and where, Add, or I’m back to the valley with this, and you’ll never be able to set foot there again.”
“The hell I won’t.”
“Want to try it?”
A snarl curled his lips. I stood my ground. I watched him think it over. Then he grinned again, in a way I didn’t understand. At the time I thought he was like that weasel, giving one last fierce grin of rage as it was killed.
“They’re landing at Dana Point, this Friday night. Midnight.”
I threw the bag at him and ran.
At first I ran like a hunted deer, leaping big falls of wood and crashing through smaller ones in my new luxury of sound, scared that I might have thrown Add a gun, or that he would turn out to be a knife thrower, and put that thick blade in my back. But after crossing most of San Mateo Valley I knew I was safe, and I ran for joy. Triumphantly I danced between trees, leaped over bushes where I could have run around them, tore small branches out of my path. I ran up to the freeway, and sprinted down it at full speed. I don’t think I’ve ever run faster in my life, or enjoyed it more. “Friday night!” I crowed at the sky, and flew down that road like a car, the knot in my stomach gone at last.
18
But the knot didn’t stay away for long. I ran into the valley straight to the Nicolins’, only to be told by Mrs. N. that Steve was out somewhere with Kathryn. I thanked her and left, uneasy already. Were they arguing again? Making up? Was Kathryn talking him out of all this? (That didn’t seem likely.) I checked a few of our regular hangouts, none too anxious to find Kathryn, but compelled by a desire to see Steve immediately. No sign of them anywhere. No way of guessing where they were or what they were doing. Climbing back down Swing Canyon I realized I didn’t understand the two of them anymore, if I ever had. Where do you go after a fight like the one I had overheard? The private lives of other couples—there’s few things more private than that. Nobody but the two know what’s going on between them, even if they talk about it with others. And if they don’t then it’s a complete mystery, hidden from the world.
So that was Wednesday evening. I went back to the Nicolins’ twice that night, but no one showed up. And the longer I waited to tell Steve, the more uneasy I got about it. What would Kathryn say when she learned my part in this? She would think I had lied to her, betrayed her trust. On the other hand, if I didn’t tell Steve about the landing, and let it pass—and if he ever found out what I had done—well, that didn’t bear thinking about. I’d lose my best friend at that very moment.
After my second visit to the Nicolins’ I went home and went to bed. It had been
such a day I thought I would have trouble falling asleep, but a few minutes after I lay down I was out. A couple of hours later I woke up, though, and for the rest of the night I tossed and turned, listened to the wind, considered what I should do.
Just after dawn I woke up with the knot in my stomach, and trying to get back to sleep only made it worse. I faintly remembered a dream that was so awful I made no attempt to recall it more clearly—something about being chased—but a few moments later I wasn’t even sure of that. Stepping outside for my morning pee I discovered a Santa Ana wind—the desert wind that pours over from the hills to the east and pushes all the clouds out to sea, and heats up the land, and makes everything dry for a time. Santa Anas strike three or four times a year, and change our weather completely. This one was picking up even as I watched, twisting the trees all backward to their natural onshore bent. Soon pine branches would be snapping off and gliding seaward.
The empty water bucket gave me a shock when I picked it up. Static electricity, Tom called it, but try as he would he couldn’t make me understand it. Something about millions of tiny fires rushing around (of course you remember how well he explained fire to me) … and all the wires strung between towers like the Shankses’ place had carried this electricity around, and it had powered all the automatic machines of the old time. All that power from little snaps like the one I had felt.
Walking to the river in the raw morning sun it seemed that everything was packed with color, as if static electricity might be something that filled things and made them brighter. The hair on my arms stood away from my skin, and I could feel the roots in my scalp as the wind pulled my hair this way and that. Static electricity … maybe it gathered in humans over the stomach. At the river I stepped in to my knees, ducked my head under, sloshed water down my throat and back up, hoping the electricity might catch to the water and leave with it. It didn’t work.
Wide awake now. Cat’s paws fanned across the river’s surface, one after another, helping it down to sea. Already the air was warm and dry; it felt like it would be burning soon. The sky was a bright pale blue. I drank half a bucket of water, threw rocks at a fallen tree stuck against the other bank. What to do? Gulls wheeled and flapped overhead, complaining at how hard they had to work in this backwards wind. I walked back to my house and ate a loaf of bread with Pa.